David Simon on Treme, the CIA and Why TV Isn’t Journalism

David Simon is currently shooting the final season of his drama Treme in New Orleans.Photo: Paul Schiraldi/HBO

David Simon would like people to watch his television shows, but he wouldn’t mind if they occasionally picked up a book.

It’s not that the man behind HBO dramas The Wire and Treme, which ends its third season Sunday, wants you to switch off his series, he just figures some familiarity with long-form storytelling might help people understand them.

“I think very few people are looking to long-form prose for their storytelling anymore in America,” Simon said in a recent interview with Wired. “Most of America has learned to assess the realities of the criminal justice system, for example, from watching cases evolve in 40 minutes of television on the Law & Order stuff or CSI — that is the preeminent standard for storytelling…. I’m searching for a much different audience, and whether it’s there or not is an open question.”

Finding an audience has always kind of been Simon’s biggest problem. Adored by critics, The Wire didn’t get great ratings and barely completed its five-season run. And it was recently announced that Treme’s fourth and final season would only be five episodes, instead of 10 — leaving Simon with a lot of storylines to tie up in his complex drama about the problems of rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But he’s determined to do it, because if there’s one thing David Simon will fight for, it’s completing a story once he’s started telling it.

With Season 3 coming to an end, Wired talked to the prolific Emmy winner and former Baltimore Sun reporter, who is currently filming Treme’s final run in New Orleans, about the end of the show, approaching a TV show like a journalistic endeavor even if its not journalism, and why he’d like his next project to be a show about the history of the CIA. (Eds. Note: Yes, please!)

Wired: Now that Season 3 of Treme is wrapping up, what do you hope audiences take away from it?

David Simon: I think in some very basic ways Treme is not constructed in the same way that, for example, The Wire was. The Wire, because we could artificially introduce the chronological life of the city, we could arbitrarily decide that we were going to focus on education this year, political reform that year, we’ll make this year the election year, or now we’ll do the death of work. It [came] from a completely fictional framework as The Wire largely did, though it took realities in Baltimore, it paid no heed to the political and economic and social chronologies of the city. If you’re going to do that you can shape things to a much greater extent. You can cheat real life.

With Treme, the first thing we do before every year is we put on the board what actually happened in New Orleans and when, and we look to use that as our spine, our story spine. That requires that we be more honest about how people’s lives intersect with the political and therefore with the thematic. Therefore, it can’t be as pristine. The benefit of that is that you start to feel like you’re starting to watch people’s actual lives in an actual place.

“With Treme the first thing we do before every year is we put on the board what actually happened in New Orleans and when, and we look to use that as our story spine.”

Wired: Does that make your job at least a little easier, since you know what milestones you have to hit?

Simon: Right. There are some things we can’t do and there are some things we don’t want to say regardless of how dramatic it might be, because it’s not the truth — it’s not thematically true with what the stakes were in New Orleans after Katrina and what became important and what didn’t. It’s an exercise that’s partly drama, but it’s also an exercise in — I don’t know what you want to call it — sociology, ethnography, journalism. It doesn’t have the academic rigor of sociology, nor does it have the pristine nonfiction of journalism, but it’s employing a lot of the impulses that drive reporters and other people to assess things like a city.

The first year we tried to just focus on the idea of the people coming back, and what that meant to come back. The second year of Treme, we looked at introducing the idea of the problems, that they were not going to come back and begin — it wasn’t after the flood Noah landing his ark and everybody coming out and having a second clean chance of building a pristine society from scratch. Then in Season 3, the money comes back and some of the presumed solutions that were predicated on money coming…. So when money and the new plans and the new opportunities, or seeming opportunities, come back, that leads to choices all around about what kind of New Orleans you’re going to build. That was the overriding theme of Season 3.

Wired: What effect were you hoping to achieve with the introduction of the journalist character, L.P.?

Simon: The real journalist is A.C. Thompson but we went with L.P. to give that poor guy a little bit of distance. He was amenable to the adventure. The other thing that ultimately happened in Season 3 is that people began to realize in New Orleans that they were essentially on their own. There was nobody looking out for them and for the actual interest of the city. There were people who said they were, and there were people who were in a place where they might have interposed between some of the excesses of venture capitalism or some of the indifference of certain bureaucracies, but they failed to do so. And ultimately it was down to regular citizens to start asserting for their own lives and their own communities.

Some of that was internal to New Orleans, and people who didn’t think they had the skill sets to contest what was going on found that they did indeed have agency, and other people came from the outside who were committed. And A.C. was one of those. He came down here with a news tip and he started to work it. Eventually he was joined by reporters from the Picayune and others who took up the gauntlet. He wrote the first stories that started to bring out what everyone already knew, which was that the police department in New Orleans had lost itself during the storm and murdered people with impunity, without any looking back.

Ultimately, it was even darker than that — a lot of these cases they were looking at there were cases going back before the storm. So there was a culture with the NOPD that was problematic and was just there to be exacerbated by something like Katrina. All credit to A.C. If a television show just wanted to be an entertainment, they would’ve had the [Toni] Burnette character [played by Melissa Leo] find this all out and be the hero of the piece after all they had invested in her point of view, right? We’re actually interested in what happened in New Orleans. So while the Burnett character is a natural alliance, and in fact A.C. did know and come to engage with others who were trying to preserve civil rights in New Orleans and human rights in New Orleans, it was his journey.

Wired: What’s on the board for Season 4?

Simon: I don’t think it’s a lie to say that we’re looking at 10 pounds of shit in a 5-pound bag because we have five episodes and that just is what it is. I credit HBO for letting us go as far as we have with a television show that is not pulling numbers, but The Wire didn’t pull numbers and I don’t think I’ll ever be involved with anything that pulls numbers. That’s not what I do. It’s a little bit frustrating. As much as I respect the decision, it is a little frustrating trying to finish out in five hours what we had planned for 10.

What we’re trying to do is not only conclude the character arcs but speak to the overall purpose of doing Treme, which I’m not sure saying it in interviews helps the cause. If I could tell you what the show was about, I wouldn’t have to make it.

Wired: It can’t easily be said with words.

Simon: Right. Well, it can be. I certainly can, but I’m not sure that if I do so people will watch it with the same sense of adventure that you have when you open up a book or watch a long narrative on television.

That said, it’s fair to say, and I’ve said in other places, when we did The Wire a lot of people said, “Why don’t they leave, man? Baltimore is kind of a fucked-up place.” And I never felt that way. I don’t feel that way to this day. I live in Baltimore. And I live in New Orleans. I’m invested in the survival of both cities. I was shocked by the tonality of that — that people thought we were just being cynical and implying a certain kind of decay. No, we were arguing for the city. You either save the city, or you lose the American spirit, you lose the American soul for the next 100 or 200 years. We’re not going to be rural people. We’re going to be more and more urban people, and more multicultural, and we’re either going to solve these problems that are inherent in the modern American city, or we’re not going to be a first-rate society.

“We’re either going to solve these problems that are inherent in the modern American city, or we’re not going to be a first-rate society.”

The argument for the city that I thought was apparent and understood as a precondition for The Wire, it seemed like that had to be hit harder and using a different parable. So you had this city, New Orleans, that had this near-death experience in 2005. People came back to assert for their community and found a wider range of problems, normally associated with the city — New Orleans has them all in spades, no doubt, but also has this incredible fundamental culture. Everything is a tradition, everything is an argument for community.

That engine was apparent to Eric and myself just coming down here and doing reporting after the storm. I would argue, and I think Treme argues, is that’s what brought the city back. People couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. That idea of what the American city is capable of — what we’re capable of producing in terms of art, in terms of spirit, in terms of community — it’s probably the most patriotic piece I’ll ever be involved in making.

Wired: Right. The idea is that New Orleans becomes a microcosm for America in a broader sense.

Simon: If you’re watching closely it’s allegorical. If you’re not it’s a bunch of guys playing music and dancing around in funny costumes. I can’t help that. If you’re watching closely, The Wire is allegorical — it wasn’t just a bunch of drug dealers in Baltimore. I love to play the interior narrative game where you don’t explain everything to people. But I certainly don’t want to alienate the people who know the culture or who know the dynamic. If I’m making Generation Kill, I don’t want Marines to look at it and call bullshit right away.

But if you’re not making a piece for a general audience then you’re not going to reach a general audience. That’s always a balancing act and you could say I’m not very good at balancing acts, considering the numbers, but I do think people will find Treme. When they look back over the 36 hours and see where these characters began, where they ended, and why their stories matter and how they’re fit together thematically, I think that, like with The Wire, which didn’t find its audience fully until it was all completed, I think people will see the merit in it. If I’m wrong, well, I don’t know how to do it any other way. I’m as proud of this piece as anything I’ve ever worked on.

Wired: Do you think that people don’t get into your shows until they’re complete because you create shows that are full stories beginning to end, not just episodes?

Simon: I think it’s more of the world of “books”/”no books.” I think very few people are looking to long-form prose for their storytelling anymore in America. The numbers are saying that. You sell 100,000 hardbacks in America and you have a New York Times bestseller. Those are incredibly small numbers when you compare them to the television audience or a film audience, especially a television audience. I have the absurd misfortune/great fortune — it goes both ways — of working in this mass medium of television where my numbers are appalling — if you get half a million viewers or 600,000 viewers on Sunday night you’re not doing well, you get a couple million for the week you’re not doing well. But by standards of prose narrative, that’s huge.

People found The Wire only after a lot of people started asserting for the fact that it all held together at the end. At the time it was like, “Man, this show is slow!” [Laughs] To me it’s moving a lot faster than a multi-POV novel and I’m one of those people that acquires some of my storytelling, a lot of my storytelling, from prose narrative.

“So I can either lie, or I can basically say, ‘You know, I’m more interested in who we are and what’s at stake than I am in entertaining you.’ That may be the stupidest decision that any person with a television show ever made, but I can’t help myself.”

Wired: It’s funny when people say a show is moving slow when it still manages to cram in a whole year in New Orleans into 10 episodes of TV.

Simon: And we know where we’re cheating. For example, A.C.’s story, which will be published — our character L.P.’s story will be published in The Nation magazine in the last episode [airing Sunday]. In truth, that didn’t come out until August, so we’re advancing it for purposes of actually making it a coda on Season 3, we had to advance it in terms of the speed with which it occurred by about four months. We had to cheat because, guess what? Real life moves even slower than we’re depicting.

You want to see these cops that we’ve been misbehaving for so long in Treme, you want to see them arrested, you want to see the handcuffs click, you want to have the satisfaction of knowing that somebody responds to this and there’s some kind of victory. The truth is, none of these cases came forward until the change in federal administration — until after the election in 2008. The Justice Department was so resistant to bringing a civil rights case under the Bush administration that no cases were brought. So I can either lie, or I can basically say, “You know, I’m more interested in who we are and what’s at stake than I am in entertaining you.” That may be the stupidest decision that any person with a television show ever made, but I can’t help myself.

Wired: To that point, how much do you think about your shows as an act of journalism? Even if exact facts aren’t true, most of the themes and ideas and, in some cases characters, are based in reality.

Simon: I’m really specific that I don’t think of them as journalism. There’s a lot of journalism that gets its nose out of joint at fiction and cheats and I think [those things are] a problem. So you’ll never catch me saying it’s journalism.

But what you will catch me saying, is that this kind of storytelling is motivated in part by some of the same things that motivated me to become a journalist. I have some of the same interests in argument, in debate, as I did when I was a reporter. Having said that, there are impulses in terms of drama that have to be serviced, that have to be respected. There are other people on staff who advocate for some of those, effectively. Eric [Overmyer, Simon’s co-creator] is very interested in what happened in real New Orleans. He actually has more bona fides when it comes to delivering honest assessments of what we should be talking about in terms of New Orleans than he might otherwise get credit for. I’m the reporter. He’s the playwright. It’s not that cut and dry. There are times when I’m arguing for drama and he’s arguing for fact. But all of us are interested, to a certain extent, in both.

Wired: What about the approach to how you create your shows? It seems like you do a lot of research and reporting before writing anything.

Simon: We do a lot of research, yeah. If we don’t know something, we send people from the office out to do the reporting if we can’t get to it. And if we’re exploring a full theme that we don’t know about then we have the hiatus to go explore that and do interviews and gather information before we even sit down and start discussing how we’re going to portray the story.

“We have profoundly influenced the second half of the 20th century and beyond. The forces that we set into motion after World War II, I don’t think most Americans know their own history.”

Always we’re trying to acquire consultants who we can just throw ourselves at and say, “How does this work?” In the case of Treme, we have a separate consultant who’s just giving us hip-hop and New Orleans bounce music, and there’s a guy who is the go-to guy for the [Mardi Gras] Indians and modern jazz, then there’s another guy for brass band and Cajun music. We’re trying to retain everybody as a resource, because it’s just more fun to get it right than to get it wrong.

Wired: Do you have any idea what you’d like to do after Treme?

Simon: I have a few projects, but it’s not even worth talking about them because until they get the green light, you don’t know what’s going and what’s not. I know that I probably don’t want to talk [HBO] into anything they don’t want to do, because then it’s just harder to finish it. It’s a horrifying thing if you’re somebody who is interested in a story as a complete entity, with a beginning, a middle and an end…. We’re getting out of Treme by the skin of our ass, and we got out of The Wire by the skin of our ass. It’s exhausting, it’s debilitating. I don’t know that it can be avoided because this is television and what are you going to do? You must assume some risk at the beginning when you start a story. But I’d rather assume less risk than more. I’d rather at least start with a premise they’re fully committed to. But in some ways it’s about us coming up with some ideas and saying, “Do you like any of these?” At the same time I don’t want to walk into the office and say, “Tell me what you want to show and I’ll go do it” because I don’t want to tell a story I’m not interested in.

Wired: If you were to get a new show, any idea what you’d like to focus on, what world you’d like to explore?

Simon: I would love to do a history of the CIA from the end of World War II, when it was the OSS, on. I think there’s a lot to be said about America’s foreign policy footprint and who we are in the world and what the rest of the world has gleaned from us that is worthy, and what it has gleaned from us that is not. We have profoundly influenced the second half of the 20th century and beyond. The forces that we set into motion after World War II, I don’t think most Americans know their own history. Or they only know the version of their history is kind of compartmentalized…. I would love to do that piece.

I’m also looking at a piece that involves Manhattan in the 1970s. Midtown Manhattan. There’s a couple miniseries floating around there. Whatever it is, it has to have legs so that it’s not just about what it’s about, you know?

“I’m not particularly interested in porn as porn, but I’m fascinated by the allegory for capitalism.”

Wired: It has to prove a point.

Simon: Right. One of the stories we’re interested in is … when pornography came out of the closet in the 1970s and the middle of Manhattan became this porn emporium. I’m not particularly interested in porn as porn, but I’m fascinated by the allegory for capitalism. The idea of product and this moment at which a product went from being impermissible and under-the-counter to overt and taking up real estate in the largest American city. And then this moment when the real estate became utterly expendable, because the product changed and everything went to home video. Then everybody who had seized on the physical plant — including the mob, and politicians, and real estate — at some point it all transpired to Disney. It’s a remarkable allegory for venture capitalism.

Wired: Now that we’ve talked about both the CIA and the porn industry, out of curiosity, did the recent scandal with former CIA director David Petraeus influence your thinking at all? You wrote a pretty interesting blog piece on the media scrum around it.

Simon: Actually, that’s just weird. I’ve read so many books on the CIA over the last two years…. I could tell you how many affairs, well not how many, but I could tell you how profligate Allen Dulles was in his decade as CIA spymaster and how out-of-the-ordinary the moment with Petraeus is. Honestly, I’m just reacting to the headlines. I think everyone had something to say about Petraeus for 15 minutes, and some of them are still talking.

But I find sex to be an incredibly ordinary topic. It has no second act. But if you try to monetize anything, and you try to do so in the context of a societal norm, or a societal morality — that’s interesting. Now you’re looking at the drug trade, for example. I think in some ways that’s more interesting to me than the sex. Sex is just sex, it’s powerful shit if you get to be in the room, but try to get other people interested in it and it’s just porn.